They didn’t play the game. The Hove Coffee Concert format is ‘music in the
round’ but the Czech Wihan String Quartet left out the interesting bonus bit.
The custom is that the musicians change seats after each work so that the
surrounding audience get a different view of them. But they stayed put.

This is not simply frivolous musical chairs but a gift to the listener of
a different camera angle onto the instruments and also the interesting and often
engaging personalities playing them. It draws the audience even more
magnetically into the performance and enhances the experience and value for
money.

But were the Wihans, their line-up unaltered after almost 20 years
together, stuck in old-dog's tricks, I wondered? They presented the same
faces and backs of heads to an Old Market audience now accustomed to being
allowed even more fully into the intimacy of chamber music performance. The
proven Coffee Concerts forma are now in their 10th season and capable
of selling the place out. Even so, the placement is not that big a deal or
even a beef with the Wihans. What’s the more important, after all? The
music or its presentation?

The concert began with the first of Mozart’s six forward - leaping quartets
dedicated to Haydn - K387. This was a reading of grace yet with momentum,
with apparent spontaneity couple with control. But instead of leaving the stage
between pieces to create a natural pause for breath, after two bows
to the applause, the Wihan quartet sat went straight on to Schubert’s A
minor Quartet D804. This was a different kind of presentation, with a sense of
continuity and flow from one musical voice in Vienna to another. It had an
effect; but I'm not sure that it satisfied everyone.

It's a moot point. Does a chamber music audience – or indeed any classical music
audience – need a moment or two to digest what they have heard and enjoyed? And
also a further moment more to prepare for the next work, with a sense of
anticipation if they know it? Or else, if not for those reasons, don’t
listeners need time to empty their receptive sensory slates and reach for fresh
ones? I rather think so.

After playing the Mozart with all repeats, the Wihan Quartet may well have
disappointed waiting worshippers of Schubert’s “heavenly length” by omitting his
first movement repeat. For myself, I happened to fall this morning into
the category that opted for the more cerebral and succinct approach which
asks “Why say again what has been sufficiently been stated already?” The counter
arguments go something like this of course, “Hey, but I liked (or cherished)
this music so much that I wanted (or was desperate) to hear it again” -
or, “Thank you, but please, may I be allowed to enjoy deeper insight the second
time around?” Whatever the audience expected however, the Wihans were the
people with the artistic prerogative. And such is the power of Schubert to
enrapture with his rich harmony and sense of dreamy exploration of mood,
that if the Quartet had been lengthened by the repeat, the players might not
have achieved their intended balance within the morning’s programme.

To come after the interval was their own countryman Dvořák’s post-American work,
the Quartet in Ab, Op 105. It seemed to amount roughly to the same length as the
Schubert and its purpose and effect was to present a contrasting impetus and
outlook to the inescapably introverted Schubert.

Schubert was always going to walk away having left us the more memorable tunes.
But Dvořák lifted the heart because Schubert, even despite switching his
finale - the work’s most energetic movement – from his A minor scheme to A
major, temperamentally, maintains his impulse to cloud his new soundscape with
the darker shade of an A minor episode which he uses twice.

After Schubert’s agitated and unquiet opening movement, the Wihans gave us a
gentle and ruminative account of his endearing Rosamunde variations.
Leading with Ales Kapric’s low-breathing cello, they created a deep and
recurrent melancholy in the Menuetto – as though the vertically-challenged
Schubert could persuade none of the ladies to have the last dance with him.

But in the finale, within the contained moderate tempo Schubert requested, I was
lifted by the Wihan’s deft and subtle performance of music that made me imagine
him playing hide and seek with, this time, a willing female companion, in a
large and beautiful, asymmetrically laid-out garden - music of painfully
brief passing happiness with a sudden moment at which the game seems halted in
shock. By him unsuccessfully trying to steal a kiss perhaps? Or, as I
would prefer to think, by his discovery, on the grass, of a dead song thrush?
I apologise for these romantic metaphors . . . perhaps I love this music just a
little too much.